was
a spur, an exasperation; he found himself swimming furiously, wasting
strength, in the thought of encountering it.

Good luck and not calculation brought him ashore on the broadside of
the Barbary Coast, in a small dock where a Norwegian barque lay
slumbering alongside the wharf. Her watchman, if she had one, was not
in sight; it was upon her deck that he dressed himself, fumbling
hurriedly into the shirt and trousers which he had failed, after all,
to keep dry. He jerked his belt tight about him and felt the
sheath-knife which it carried pressing against his back. He reached
back and slid it round to his right side, where his hand would drop
on it easily; it might chance that before the night was over he would
need a weapon.

He had no notion of the hour nor of the length of time he had been in
the water. As he passed bare-footed from the wharf he was surprised
to find the shabby street empty under its sparse lamps. It lay
between its mean houses vacant and unfamiliar in its quietude; it
seemed to him as though the city waited in a conscious hush till he
should have done what he had come to do. His bare feet on the
sidewalk slapped and shuffled, and he hurried along close to the
walls; the noise he made, for all his caution, appeared to him
monstrous, enough to wake the sleepers in the houses and draw them to
their windows to see the man who was going to find Tom Mowbray.

An alley between gapped and decrepit board fences brought him to the
back of the house he sought; he swung himself into the unsavory back
yard of it without delaying to seek for the gate. The house was over
him, blank and lightless, its roof a black heap against the night
sky. He paused to look up at it. He was still without any plan; not
even now did he feel the need of one. To go in to break in, if that
were the quickest way to stamp his stormy way up the room where Tom
Mowbray was sleeping, to wrench him from his bed and then let loose
the maniac fury that burned within him all that was plain to do. He
cast a glance at the nearest window, and then it was that the door of
the house opened.

He was standing to one side, a dozen paces from it; a single,
noiseless step took him to the wall, against which he backed,
screened by the darkness, and waited to see who would come forth. A
figure appeared and lingered in the doorway, and he caught the
sibilance of a whisper, and immediately upon it a dull noise of
tapping, as though someone beat gen